Rating: ☹️

Cats is the ultimate bad movie of 2019. It is a film so derailed and divisive that it's warranted an entire week’s worth of reactions on this website alone. But there's another stench curling up from the floorboards; the sickly sweet rot plumes of a body too hastily concealed. Dead on arrival, this corpse was exhumed from theaters a mere two weeks after release - it couldn't even hang around for Christmas. I'm speaking of The Playmobil Movie, a cinematic cadaver which would have been the worst of 2019 if not for Tom Hooper’s utter catastrophe.

Regardless of playing second rotten banana to Cats, you might not have heard of The Playmobil Movie. Neither did most people, considering the film now resides alongside Delgo and The Oogieloves as one of the all-time worst grossing films released on 2,000 or more screens. The Playmobil Movie is bad cinema history, but it's also a gruesome specter which has haunted my life for a massive chunk of 2019. I’m more familiar with The Playmobil Movie than any human should be, and that's because I have been relentlessly promoting this silver screen shitshow to the people of Austin for at least six months.

Capitalism makes rat bastards of us all, and I am no exception. I work at a local toy store and “preferred” Playmobil dealer to pay my bills, which means I am complicit in lying out my ass to gas up The Playmobil Movie. I didn't know what the movie was about, or when it would release, but pushing it became an intrinsic part of my life; another sales pitch in the catalog of reflexive bullshit you tell customers to navigate working retail. I spent the fall inundated by merch items, promotional standees, and a four-foot statue of main character Marla, all months before the film made totally undetected landfall in America. After a year of buildup, none of my coworkers noticed when the movie finally released, and I don't think any of them even got a chance to see it.

I, however, saw The Playmobil Movie at the first opportunity. I assume this was latent Christian guilt telling me to repent the sin of promoting a movie I knew would be bad. So, I bought a ticket for an 11 AM Saturday showing at the Barton Creek mall - the only screening in the entirety of the Austin metroplex for a film which had released seven days prior. I was the sole person in the theater up until the trailers rolled, and I sequestered myself and my journal in the back-back row of recliners. I still don't know if this is worse or better than sitting among the sparse families that eventually filtered in.

With a whole row to myself (the “Cinema Pervert Zone”), I was able to experience The Playmobil Movie in total comfort. I took four solid pages of notes, so here we go. The Playmobil Movie is about Marla, a girl left to look after her brother Charlie when their parents beef it in the first five minutes. Charlie runs away to a toy museum, where he and Marla are inexplicably laser-sucked into the world of Playmobil. Charlie, who inhabits the body of an adult male Playmobil Viking, is captured by the evil Emperor Maximus as fodder for his coliseum games. Marla must journey through a rip-off of The LEGO Movie to rescue him, and ultimately, repair their relationship.

Also, the characters sing sometimes. It’s The Playmobil Movie Musical. Surprise!

Frankly, I could tell you anything about this film’s plot or structure and it wouldn't matter, because The Playmobil Movie is barely a movie at all. It is more akin to a medical operation; a surgical procedure in which 99 minutes of your life are excised with uncanny precision. It is a film in the most dictionary definition of the word: here are an hour and thirty-nine minutes of images and sounds meant to evoke an emotional reaction, which you can pay money to experience. “Money,” of course, is the operative word here.

The Playmobil Movie was born of grievous greed; brought into the world to turn dollars from an audience I don't believe actually exists. It is a cynical, insulting film, cobbled together from bits and bobs of more worthwhile media. The ghoulish doctors who stitched this Frankenstein’s monster knew what parts they required to make a body, but not how they fit together or function. What we’re left to contend with is a shambling creature which begins, lurches scene to scene, and then ends, for no other reason than that's what movies are meant to do. It is a sad, perfunctory beast; completely secondary to the merchandise it’s meant to sell.

Though, I can't imagine what child would possibly want toys based on The Playmobil Movie. The locations are generic and empty, the action sequences are tranquilized, and the characters are assholes only a long-suffering mother could love. Every element that should be cool or fun is handled with cynical disinterest, because slapping glitter on a horse means idiot kids will eat that shit up. Even The Playmobil Movie’s songs are completely miserable. They all unfold like a bad edible trip, coming in first with gradual rhythm-speaking, before suddenly erupting into pop-radio slop which I couldn't recall with a gun to my head.

There’s more, of course. The villain is so odiously queer-coded he would've been gauche in the ‘90s, much less today. A huge chunk of the plot directly rips off Han Solo’s debt to Jabba the Hutt, right down to the slug creature. A horrible, burbling robot falls in love with Marla, and seems as though he could hump her leg at any moment. Daniel Radcliffe’s performance sounds literally phoned in, as in recorded through an iPhone. It's awful! Just thinking about it breaks me down. It's exhausting. The Playmobil Movie is so empty and rote that it's not even fun to write about, much less watch.

By the time the credits rolled, I hadn't heard a single laugh, cheer, or any response at all from the families in attendance. At that point, it was less a theater than a mausoleum. We had all, unexpectedly, witnessed the end of a life, and sworn in silence to never speak of it again. Walking out, I felt truly, actually guilty that I had pushed this gutter trash on other people. I expected the film to be bad, but innocuous. Instead, I saw a whirling, screeching void of antimatter; a movie where I feel as though I know less about the world for having seen it. I will never understand how this film got made, and maybe that's for the best.

I cannot and will not recommend The Playmobil Movie. If part of your truth is watching infamously bad films, I won't stop you. But, I want you to know that this film is dead tissue. It is an organism which can be observed, but has gone functionally inert. There is no value here, good or bad; nothing worth sacrificing close to two hours of your life for. You will not laugh; you will simply be exhausted. Scholars debate how best to warn post-apocalypse generations of lingering nuclear waste, but the best I can do to warn our future children of The Playmobil Movie is this review. Stay far, far away.

THE PLAYMOBIL MOVIE: Dead Tissue